


And the Twelfth One is When It Gets Real Majestic

by Hotel_Denouement



Category: Gravity Falls, ParaNorman (2012)
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:46:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hotel_Denouement/pseuds/Hotel_Denouement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their first meeting is punctuated memorably with a bike accident. More specifically, Norman meets the Pines twins when he crashes his bicycle into Dipper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Twelfth One is When It Gets Real Majestic

It’s a surprisingly mild-weathered July in Oregon that year, comfortably balmy and not unlike the ones he knows from Massachusetts’s better summers. “Outdoorsy” is not a word Norman would use to describe himself, but his dad doesn’t want to go to the one place in Gravity Falls that Norman is particularly interested in visiting, so biking down the twisting trails and roads that slope down the mountain from their rented cabin is really all he has left to do to entertain himself. The number of ghosts he’s seen within the city limits has also been unexpectedly low. He doesn’t make a habit of actively seeking out dead people, but he’s anything if not curious to see if this mysterious town is hiding anything.

That said, Norman supposes he doesn’t have much of a reason to be surprised when his search for forest-dwelling spirits lands him in trouble, but it’s not everyday that the trouble itself has nothing to do with the ghost. The ghost is a young man, a quiet guy with wide eyes that follow Norman when he passes by. The noose wrapped around his neck is drawn tight and digging into his skin, and a breeze sends him swaying—

“Hey, look out— _MABEL!_ ”

A shrill shriek snaps Norman’s attention back to the dusty road just in time for him to avoid bowling over a girl standing in the road. He shouts and yanks his handlebars to the right, swerving around her with a sandy skid that kicks up a hazy cloud of gravel and dirt. His sharp, sudden turn has gravity coaxing him down, and he tilts hard to the left in an attempt at saving himself an unpleasant fall—

But there’s _another_ one, _another_ person in the road at the mercy of his front wheel, and it’s too late for Norman to save either of them this time, no matter how hard he squeezes the brakes. He tries, though. His bike jolts and there’s a yelp that segues into a wheeze, and the world whirls awkwardly before Norman’s eyes as he goes airborne. He has enough time to wonder if he should tuck in all his limbs or if he should cover his head and wait for impact but not enough time to actually do either of those things before he hits the ground. The dirt is rough and unforgiving as his cheek scrapes fast and heavy along the road, and there’s a bright starburst of pain when his nose cracks against the gnarled root of a tree that had squirmed itself out of the earth.

He lies there, dazed but not unconscious, feeling the involuntary tears and warm surge of blood gumming in the sand pressed to his face. His ears are ringing, and he struggles to gather his bearings when he hears the two people’s voices.

“Oh my God,” Norman splutters messily, specks of crimson flying from his mouth when he speaks. He shoves himself to his hands and knees and turns to look at them. The shift in position makes his broken nose throb fiercely and his eyes water again. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

The girl he’d managed not to mow down is tending to Norman’s victim, a boy who thankfully hasn’t been hurt too badly to sit up and clutch his shin, where a terrible gash slices viciously up four inches to his knee. Norman’s heart sinks low to his stomach like a rock and shame rises up in his throat like bile.

But the boy says, “Yeah, I think so, your bike just kind of got me…” and he sounds more startled than pained, which Norman guesses makes sense, since he must have come flying down the sloping road out of nowhere. There’s a cut on the boy’s forehead that dribbles red into his eyebrow like paint, but aside from that and the slash on his leg, he doesn’t look too badly hurt. Norman can’t tell if he was covered in dirt and dust before or after the collision.

“Oh my gosh!” the girl blurts suddenly, finally looking up at Norman. “Your face!” Norman’s not sure how he looks, but going by the sharp taste of copper on his teeth and the steady bass line of throbbing pain radiating from the center of his face, he suspects it’s not pretty. He lifts a hand to pinch his nose shut and groans at how much just _that_ hurts, not to mention how dismayingly slick it is at his fingertips.

“I’m fine,” he says thickly, struggling to his feet and limping unsteadily over to them to check the boy out. “Are you really okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t—I wasn’t looking—”

“Whoa, hey, yeah!” The boy stares up at him from the ground, the red-stained fingers of one hand sealed over the cut on his leg and the dirt-smudged ones on the other going in the air to stop Norman. Underneath the crooked bill of a baseball cap, his eyes are wide with pupils tightly constricted and eyebrows drawn tight and alert with concern.

“I think you broke your face,” the girl observes with a grimace full of metal, grasping the boy’s hand and helping him to his feet. They look like siblings.

“Yeah, I—” Norman’s head is spinning slowly like a globe. His face feels raw and hot and dirty. An ant has buried its stinging jaws in his eyelid.

“Okay, uh,” the boy says uncertainly, “we have, like, band-aids and stuff back at the shack—can you walk?”

“Me?” Norman says stupidly.

“Yeah, you. Mabel, get his bike.” The boy tugs experimentally on Norman’s sleeve and Norman takes a wobbly step forward. His balance seems all right. Mabel picks Norman’s bike up and helps herself to the seat, pedaling in a circle and coming to pause next to her brother, who pulls on Norman a second time, urging him to follow.

Norman’s voice is weak and clogged with blood as he insists for a third time, “I’m really sorry—”

“Dude, relax, let’s just get you to the Mystery Shack.”

“Some birthday, huh, Dipper?” Mabel laughs, zipping past them on Norman’s bike. She skids back around expertly a few yards ahead of them and pedals back in their direction, clearly delighting in the thing. “Nothing says happy thirteenth like a bike accident!”

Norman kind of wants to throw up. “It’s—it’s your birthday? I ran you over on your birthday?! Oh no—”

The boy, Dipper, laughs nervously, hobbling next to Norman as his sister flies past them again. “No, hey—I mean, yeah, it’s our birthday, but it’s like—you’re the one who’s got it bad right now, this is fine for me!”

Norman groans helplessly in the back of his throat, tilting his head back to stare at the pine trees stretching into the sky. Blood slips down his throat and bitterly coats his tongue. He coughs.

“No, tilt your head forward,” Dipper advises. His hand is firm at the back of Norman’s head, pushing it forward and down. Norman watches red circles splat on the road, vaguely mesmerized. He spits in a hopeless attempt to rid his mouth of the taste of soil and pennies, but naturally it’s still there. He’s self-conscious of the wet, mildly obscene mouth-breathing noises he makes and the swollen, Palahniuk-esque mess that his mouth has become. He tries his best to turn invisible next to Dipper, but it doesn’t work, and he flinches a little when Dipper prompts, “So, uh, what’s your name…?”

“Norman.” Only his broken nose makes him pronounce it funny, and he blushes when Mabel sails past with a cackle of “Hahaha! _Doorman._ ”

Norman has gotten his feet steady underneath him but the sound of Dipper’s footsteps are uneven and precarious as he limps, and when Norman looks behind them he sees that Dipper is leaving a bloody trail. Every lopsided step Norman sees Dipper take in peripheral makes him want to crawl in a hole and pretend he doesn’t exist. Wherever it is the twins are leading him to, he hopes it’s nearby so he can patch himself up and go home and hide as soon as possible.

“Uh, where…where did you say we’re going?” Norman mumbles when he spots a pennant string wrapped around two trees. Further ahead, the woods lining the road grow more decorated.

“The Mystery Shack,” says Dipper. “Our great-uncle owns it, and we’re staying with him for the summer.”

“Oh, that’s—” A glob of spit and blood dribbles unattractively down his chin, and he wipes it away quickly, embarrassed. “That’s neat…”

“You been there?” Dipper is obviously trying to make conversation, maybe in an attempt to make Norman feel better. It’s nice of him, but Norman wishes he wouldn’t. He’d appreciate it more if Dipper let him wallow in his guilt.

“Um, no.” He doesn’t like the stuffy sound of his voice from pinching his nose shut, so he carefully pulls his hand away, hoping for the best. Blood pours freely. He sighs and pinches his nose shut again. “We—my family just got here today…I wanted to see it but my dad doesn’t, so…”

“You’re not missing out, don’t worry,” Dipper assures him. “There’s nothing really mysterious in the Shack, most of the fun, spooky stuff is just, y’know, around.”

“Like…ghosts and stuff?” Norman tries.

“Yeah, there’s some ghosts.”

“And jerkwad gnomes who like to marry little girls!” Mabel crows. She soars past them and around a bend in the road ahead of them. Signs with arrows pointing to the Mystery Shack hang from every tree at this point.

“Gnomes?” Norman says cluelessly, glancing at Dipper.

Dipper pulls a face, his forehead wrinkling and smearing the blood from the cut above his eyebrow. “It’s—it’s a long, kind of embarrassing story.”

“Sorry.” Norman drops his eyes back to his feet. He’s so very tempted to let the shyness that took root in his chest so many years ago seal his throat up for good, but it’s hard for him to do that lately without some feeling of contrition for it. After all, he’s not much of a loner anymore, not since befriending Neil and gaining the trust and respect of Blithe Hollow. So with some effort, he tentatively pushes forward with conversation: “I haven’t seen a lot of ghosts around here.”

“Well, yeah, you wouldn’t, would you?” Dipper says, giving him a curious look. “You just got here today, and it’s like, what, six in the afternoon?”

“No, I mean—” Norman struggles to articulate himself. Casually mentioning ghosts hasn’t ever really been met with equally casual discussion like it’s a thing everyone knows to be true. “I-I mean…I see ghosts. Like, all the time, it’s a—it’s a thing. They’re usually everywhere, but I haven’t seen a lot here…” He pauses to wipe his bloody mouth before admitting, “I was—that’s what I was looking at when I hit you, I’m sorry—”

Dipper’s hand presses against the back of Norman’s head again, forcing him to tilt his face to the ground again. “Quit apologizing, it’s fine. You hurt yourself more than you hurt me.”

Norman opens his mouth, not sure what he’s going to say but he knows he wants to say _something_ , but closes it again when he just makes a blood/saliva bubble. His teeth click hard and they feel like rocks with the grit grinding between his molars.

The Mystery Shack looks the same as it had looked on the brochure Norman had grabbed at the Gravity Falls Welcome Center a few hours ago, but the evening sunlight that spills through the pines and paints the place in dull orange gives it the sort of vibe Neil had once told Norman the Babcock house gives him sometimes.

( _“Like, it’s not really creepy per se, but you know how you feel sometimes when you’re in someone’s house and you think to yourself, it totally wouldn’t happen, but if I got molested anywhere, it would probably be like in a hallway here or something. Y’know? It’s not just your house, lots of houses!”_ )

And Norman had been a little offended, but he gets it now. Nothing bad is going to happen at the Mystery Shack, it just gives off that an-uncomfortably-dysfunctional-family-lives-here vibe. He tactfully chooses not to tell Dipper this.

Dipper leads Norman into the Mystery Shack through the entrance to the gift shop, and under normal circumstances Norman would have liked to look around, but at the moment he keeps his eyes on the floor and only lifts them to the register when the man behind the counter speaks.

“Whoa, whoa, hey!” Stanford Pines barks, narrowing his eyes at Dipper and Norman. “What do you think you’re doing? No bleeding on the merchandise!”

“We’re not,” Dipper says with a frown. “We’re bleeding on the floor.”

“What happened?” Stan asks, taking in their battered appearances. “You pick a fight with the first kid you found?”

“No. Why would I do that?” Dipper is exasperated, like his great-uncle asks that sort of thing a lot.

“I hit him with my bike,” Norman confesses, heat creeping unpleasantly down the back of his neck. He hopes Stan isn’t particularly protective of Dipper or anything. Going by the way he slaps his knee with a hearty laugh, he guesses he’s not.

“I think his nose is broken,” Dipper presses on. “We’re gonna go clean up, okay?”

“Sure. First-aid kit’s under the sink.”

Dipper takes Norman through a door marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY” that leads into a slightly grimy, cramped kitchen. Dipper retrieves the first-aid kit from underneath the kitchen sink; he has to prod Norman to get him to move from his stance in front of the refrigerator, peering up at the mounted head of a white wolf perched on top of it.

“Our bathroom’s upstairs,” Dipper says, nudging Norman out of the kitchen towards a dark staircase. The wooden stairs creak anciently under their footsteps; the Mystery Shack is dusty and dim and rather chilly as they move up a level, and it strikes Norman with the feeling of Halloween combined with the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Norman drops his hand from his nose so he can try to breathe in.

Blood is thick and warm at the back of his throat, slick strings of it connecting with his tongue and quivering as he inhales. The taste of copper is overwhelming and sharp, and he gags once.

“Don’t throw up, don’t throw up!” Dipper says frantically. They’ve reached the landing and he hauls Norman into the bathroom and steers him to the sink. Norman clutches the sides of the sink and bows his head over it, breathing through his mouth. After a horrible unsure moment, the nausea passes.

“I’m fine,” Norman says slowly. His mouth has filled with viscous saliva, preparing for the worst, and he wishes Dipper wouldn’t look at him because he has no intentions of swallowing the stuff. He spits into the sink, a violent splatter of red on streaked, dirty white. Dipper presses a paper cup into Norman’s hand.

As Norman fills the little cup with water, he takes a gander at his face in the mirror and isn’t surprised to find it a disaster. His broken nose has bled a gory waterfall down over his mouth and chin, the bridge swollen and slightly off-center. He doesn’t get a lot of sleep as it is, so he’s not sure if the dark circles under his eyes are any better or worse than usual. His right cheek has been scraped raw with sand covering the crosshatch wound.

“Uh, wow,” he says dumbly, raising the cup to his mouth. He’s taken some unpleasant spills from varying heights in his life (City Hall comes to mind), but he’s never walked away from a fall looking quite so hellish. He swishes a mouthful of stale tap water, pondering his reflection.

“Told you,” Dipper says from behind him. He puts the first-aid kid on top of the toilet lid and sits on the edge of the bathtub, rifling through the box for disinfectant wipes.

Norman ducks his head and spits into the sink again, less red and more pink. “Told me what?”

“That you hurt yourself more than you hurt me,” Dipper clarifies. He gives Norman an awkward smile. “How’s the, uh…?” He gestures at his own nose. “Does that… _hurt?_ ”

Norman gingerly touches the bridge of his nose with a wince. It’s tender and pulsating dully. “This guy back home in Massachusetts used to call me face ache…it’s a little more accurate now, I guess.”

Dipper laughs and hands him a packet of antiseptic wipes, already tearing into his own packet and wiping down the gash on his calf. Norman peers at himself in the mirror again, trying to decide which injury to tend to first. He settles on the dirt-caked scrape on his cheek; the cold, antiseptic sting of the wipe makes him flinch and hiss.

“God, I’m such an idiot,” he sighs, wiping the raw patch of torn skin free of dirt with one hand and refilling the paper cup with the other. Sand grinds roughly in his mouth and he longs for his toothbrush.

“Come on, it was an accident,” Dipper says distractedly. Norman looks over to find him glancing between a box of bandages and a packet of gauze pads. The cut on his leg is still bleeding pretty badly, and Norman drops his gaze back to the sink guiltily as Dipper goes with the gauze.

“My dad’s gonna be pissed,” Norman says glumly when Dipper hands him two large band-aids for his cheek. “Your uncle’s not gonna, like, sue me for running you over is he?”

“Grunkle Stan?” Dipper comes to stand next to Norman, squinting into the mirror as he wipes at the cut above his eyebrow. “Nah, he’s not like that. Where are you staying, anyway?”

“We rented a chalet up the road from where I hit you.” Norman smoothes the bandages down on his cheek, wincing slightly, then takes another disinfectant wipe to clean up the mess from his nose.

“Cool, I can give you a ride back up there.”

Norman jostles his nose and makes a startles noise, bending over the sink as a fresh trickle of blood drips forth. He pinches his nose and watches as Dipper digs through the kit for something to help.

“No, it’s okay,” Norman protests, his stomach clenching nervously. He hates being a burden to anyone (except for Courtney, that’s usually kind of funny), much less to strangers. “I don’t want to bother Mr. Pines…I have my bike, anyway, don’t waste gas on me.”

“Chill out, man, we have a golf cart,” Dipper says, frowning into the first-aid kit. “I can take you back up to your cabin myself, it’s fine.” He turns to the cabinets next to the bathtub. “I think Mabel has some tampons in here…”

“Huh?” He watches, bewildered, as Dipper plucks two tampons out of a little blue box. He opens them and fiddles with the plastic bits uncertainly for a second before pulling out the cottony wads. Dipper faces Norman and swats at his hand. When Norman lets go of his nose, Dipper sticks a tampon in each nostril.

“That’ll…that’ll have to do, I guess,” Dipper says, rubbing his chin and surveying his handiwork. Norman isn’t quite sure how to deal with this turn of events, so he just stands there helplessly, blinking at Dipper slowly and feeling an uncomfortable warmth creep up his face.

After a long moment of silence, Norman asks, “Is this my punishment for hitting you on your birthday?”

“Will you feel better if I say yes?”

“I don’t know.” The tampons absorb the blood efficiently enough, though, so Norman leaves them in his nostrils. “Anyway…”

“Yeah.”

“So, uh.” He picks idly at the bandage on his cheek, looking at the floor. “I should probably get back to my cabin.”

“Yeah, okay.” Dipper leads the way out of the bathroom and Norman follows him quietly down the stairs. Dipper grabs a set of keys off the register counter and they go outside. There’s a solemn old totem pole off to the left of the porch leading from the gift shop, and a dirty golf cart is parked next to it. Norman sees his bike crammed in the little rack thing on the back bumper; Mabel and Dipper must have been on the same wavelength.

Dipper’s driving is alarming at best as they take off down the dirt road into the woods back the way they came. It’s bumpy, with Dipper vaulting over tree root after tree root and lurching over snake burrow after snake burrow. Discarded water bottles and a forgotten cell phone crunch underneath the tires. Norman wishes the golf cart came with seat belts. It takes under ten minutes for them to reach the little cluster of rental chalets with Dipper driving.

“Which one’s yours?” Dipper asks. Norman points to the cabin with his family’s car in the driveway and Dipper stops in front of it. Norman hops out of the cart and faces him, shuffling his feet uncomfortably.

“Thanks for the lift. I’m really—”

“If you say sorry again, I’m gonna run _you_ over.”

Norman tries not to flush with embarrassment, but he feels the scrape on his cheek prickle. After a pause, he settles lamely on saying, “Well, uh, happy birthday.”

Dipper smiles, and Norman takes his bicycle from the back of the golf cart.

“See you,” Dipper says with a wave, and Norman watches him spin the cart around, kicking up gravel, and speed away.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not build upon this first meeting, but for now it can stand alone!


End file.
